The surprisingly strong case for it.
One of the many disappointments of the NRC report on human spaceflight is the almost total neglect of this topic. That’s at least partially because if was rooted in a neo-Apollo mindset, which must have boots on the ground, though it’s not clear what they’ll be doing.
Thanks for that. Most people when they think of colonizing the planets think of it as being on the ground. Cool idea it might be in the clouds. How about on Jupiter and Saturn and the other gas giants?
Bob Clark
Robert,
Yes, once you get beyond thinking like an Earthling there are lots of options for space settlement. Sadly though NASA doesn’t see to care about any of them very seriously. It is really past time to redo its charter, banishing science from it in favor of technology and economic development of the Solar System as its key goals. Pure science should be left to the NSF.
Uranus is considered a gas giant, so I doubt if anyone will want to move there…
Looking at the comments on the link I thought it was in Cosmo or RedBook. People whining about George saying real men eat meat…there are way too many wussies on Earth.
Eventually, maybe…but not any time soon. Getting from a flying cloud city around Venus into orbit is tricky, but probably doable. With how deep Jupiter’s orbit is, I’m not sure what orbital velocity ends up looking like, or how bad of drag and gravity losses you’d have to deal with. Maybe solvable in the future, but I wonder…
I didn’t check his math, but someone suggests that the orbital velocity for a Low Jupiter orbit is somewhere near 40km/s… not doing that with anything near-term. You need high T/W ratio and really high Isp (probably >2000s). Mini-mag Orion? Fusion rockets? But yeah, Jupiter cloud colonies don’t seem very practical at the moment…
Might be easier around other gas giants. But even then, it’ll be ridiculously cold… and you’d definitely need some sort of nuclear power because there’s not a lot of sunlight out there.
~Jon
With Jupiters gravity so much stronger than Earth, is there a point where you could feel 1 G instead? Maybe I need to clarify…rather than being in freefall or experiencing full Jovian G is it possible to orbit Jupiter and feel 1G?
Yeah, in a Stanford torus.
Saturn and Uranus give you about 0.9 1 G’s, while Neptune is 1.2 G. The difficulty, aside from temperature, is that the atmosphere’s of the outer planets already have a very low molecular weight ( Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have atmosphere’s made up of 75 to 80 percent hydrogen, with most of the rest made up of helium), so airships and balloons would have to rely on heated hydrogen as a lifting gas (like a hot air balloon). But since these atmospheres, at Earth standard pressure, are so light, you’d also have to displace a much larger than normal volume to generate buoyancy.
Jon said “But even then, it’ll be ridiculously cold”
Jon, that’s not necessarily true. As you go deeper, it gets hotter. If you follow the link below, you’ll see last project of Dr. Robert Forward. Upon learning that he was dying, he summarized his life’s work. Here’s an excerpt that is relevant to this discussion:
Saturn Rukh is the name of my last novel. It is primarily an exercise in the possiblity of life on Saturn. Back in 1961, I wrote my very first story on the planets in their order. I was intrigued, even then, by Saturn, which is two-and-a-half times the size of earth, but is mostly gaseous. I learned that something the size of humans could float comfortably in balloons in the upper atmosphere of the planet. Further, if clad in a wet suit and with an adequate supply of oxygen, a human could dive into the interior of the planet and eventually reach a stage of equilibrium in which the gravity would be just like earth’s, and so would the temperature. The atmosphere, of course, would be mostly ammonia and other harsh substances, so the explorer would need full space-suit equipment.
From http://www.robertforward.com/Fast_Forward_Fifty_Years.htm
Yep, but space settlers won’t have any irrational fears of nuclear energy as Earthlings do.
Perfectly doable except…
boots on the ground, though it’s not clear what they’ll be doing.
Gathering resources not found in the atmosphere or space. Why does this not make a dent?
To live you need resources. To live well shouldn’t require a note from the captain. This is not hard to understand. Pretend somebody is trying to explain intrinsic value. It should take about a nanosecond to light the bulb.
If a slave mentality means freedom and liberty are foreign concepts then perhaps a microsecond.
Technology is the minor point.
All the resources on Mars won’t do you any good as your body falls apart under low gravity.
And planets tend to eventually have planetary governments which will want you to pay taxes and will take your freedoms away.
Yes, people are naturally evil. This is why private rights need to be beaten into and made contractual obligation of every martian.
Can you explain all the bodies falling apart in normal gravity? We will only know after they’ve lived there a while but I suspect 38% g will be just fine and may even provide health benefits. I know retirement communities would have less brittle bone problems since muscle mass would take up the slack (even if less than in one g.)
Well I think it’s one of the dumbest ideas around, at a certain altitude in the Venusian atmosphere there’s level where the atmosphere is near STP, so hey! Lets colonize!
Never mind that it’s within the cloud layer so you rarely if ever see anything but a Bejing smog x100. Never mind that the range of materials available to you are limited to say the least, never mind that getting back up to space is every bit (or more) as challenging as on Earth.
Freeze that sucker so the CO2 falls out and then colonize it.
But AGW already occurred there…
I can’t remember now. Did the Venetians have three eyes or three arms?
Venetians live in Venice, not on Venus, so actually, they’re almost Human.
Being part Italian meself I can say they resent being called human. Look at Sophia at 80… she’s still a goddess.
There’s another problem (apart from the immense amount of energy needed to get there and back and the high gravity in the case of Jupiter) with cloud colonies on the gas giants. It’s another problem with getting there. Getting to either Jupiter or to a lesser extent Saturn involves getting through their radiation belts, which is NOT a small problem.
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Something that occurs to me is that Mars had a massive impact (forming the north and leaving a crater larger than several of our continents combined), and Mars shortly afterwards had oceans. Mars impact link
The Earth had a more massive impact which formed the moon, and the Earth has huge oceans.
Venus shows no evidence of a massive impact, and Venus has almost no free water. Some of the extrem terrain features on Venus indicate that its rocks contain almost no water, because of the required strength to maintain such features.
A month or so ago geologists announced that the mantle’s transition zone contains several times more water than the Earth’s oceans (link, one of many). A spinel polymorph of olivine (Mg,,Fe-SiO4) called Ringwoodite (found about 410 km below the surface) can contain 2.6 percent by weight of OH, and that discovery blew out the need to explain the Earth’s oceans by cometary impacts.
So I was just wondering how deep you’d have to go inside Venus to release several ocean’s worth of hydrogen (there’s plenty of O2 locked up in its atmospheric CO2, but it doesn’t have much available hydrogen), and then I wondered if Earth and Mars had oceans because they’d been hit with a massive impactor big enough to dug deep into the spinel Ringwoodite zone, while Venus did not.
One theory is that Venus lacks plate techtonics because it doesn’t have the water that lubricates that process, the result being that the Venusian surface is renewed every few hundred million years in massive volcanic events that release the trapped (geo, Venusian?)thermal heat.
I’m wondering whether that’s the result of never having a big enough impact to disrupt the deep mantle, which would free bound hydroxyls and introduce massive amounts of water into the upper mantle, crust, and surface. If the water had been freed up, plate tectonics could’ve occurred, along with having oceans to turn CO2 into carbonates. Then the water stays up top because it doesn’t travel back down through the olivine layer all the way to the transition zone several hundred kilometers below.
Could Venus and Mercury be the default state for a rocky planet, with the free water conditions on Mars and Earth requiring a huge, huge impact?
There are a couple big factors when it comes to building off Earth colonies. Resources, environmental factors, and consistency being among the top. The need for resources is obvious. As is the difficulty of surviving in a harsh environment. However, many people overlook the difficulty of dealing with fluctuating environmental conditions. The vacuum of space is tough to engineer for, but once you get it down then you can build systems that last for decades with no maintenance. Mostly because space is a very consistent environment. It makes it easy to optimize solutions. Compare that to the moon where local temperatures fluctuate from very high to very low with a period of nearly a month. If it were one or the other it would be easier to optimize for, but when it swings between both it becomes enormously challenging. Landers on Mars have an average longer lifespan than those on the Moon, for example.
Space based habitats would have the downside of lacking resources but the upside of consistency.
A Venusian floating colony would benefit from resources (though not as great as Martian surface colonies) as well as consistency, and the environmental challenges might not be too bad. The major downside is that it would sit at the bottom of a gravity well nearly as severe as Earth’s. For Earth that is only barely tolerable because we have all of human industry available. For Mars the gravity well is so shallow you can build SSTO RLVs using 1950s technology and refuel them locally. For Venus there’s definitely a big gap in the transportation department. Until that’s closed I don’t expect Venusian colonies to be practical.
I am just amazed. Everything but the most logical place will be proposed until the martians show us all how stupid the other ideas are. Not undoable, just stupid.
You’ve convinced me. Let’s just stay here in earth orbit until we’re completely wiped out.